Google Results Have Stopped Sending Customers
Service-based businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to rely on organic search for customer acquisition. They've historically depended on high-intent keywords but are now facing challenges with Google's search results and the perceived ineffectiveness of social media, hindering their growth and requiring them to re-evaluate their marketing strategies.
SOURCES (60)
“I handle a UAE based travel agency website. Last year the clicks were 25k and this year only 6k. We have been publishing content like before. I know Ai overviews is major culprit, on top of that war has done more damage. Is there any…”
“I want to learn google ads and work with it, i study economy at the college, can be a good part time work ? I am planning of do some courses this summer. How much can i earn with it? ( for me 600 euro at month would be good) submitted by /u/ScaryStrike7043 [link] [comments]”
“I’d pause the traffic push for a moment and look closely at what the current visitors are actually doing. Traffic only becomes useful when you know which page they land on, what problem brought them there and where they drop off. Sometimes the issue isn’t monetization in general — it’s that the offer is too vague, too early or disconnected from the reason people arrived. I’d test one very clear offer for one specific visitor segment before adding more monetization methods. Even a simple paid ser”
“Congratulations! In terms of marketing channels, then I think SEO and/or affiliate could be worthwhile your time. There are most likely a tons of affiliate site out there aimed 100% at weddings, who would be happy to direct traffic to your site for an affiliate commission SEO would be to get that traffic directly instead of relying on affiliate partners SEO.”
“Hi everyone, I'm a Google/PPC ads specialist for the past 8 years The company I have been working for the past 3 years as a Google ads specialist in the law firm industry got acquired in March. Theyre an SEO first company and PPC has always kinda been on the backburner. I had a meeting with them in April and they wanted to promote me to PPC manager and expressed how much that they want the PPC manager to be ai first, be ahead of the industry, build skills, ai agents etc. Well, in May I made”
“That is the best piece of advice. Noted. Do you suggest making changes in the way the website is advertising, or is it something I should soft-launch during the marketing campaign?”
“I'm a total noob with SEO and I was looking at services from F tJ e and wondering if it's actually worth it to get started? I know DR is a vanity metric but looking at their "Grow" packages and they claim to do blogger outreach. Is it worth the money or just smoke and mirrors? submitted by /u/HoratioWobble [link] [comments]”
“I've been working as an SEO for a SaaS company for the last 8 months, and I'm looking for some advice from others in the SaaS space. Until around May, organic search was bringing us a healthy number of leads. Over the last two months, though, lead generation has dropped significantly, even though our rankings and traffic haven't declined dramatically. Our listicle/comparison blogs (e.g. "Best AI LMS", "Top LMS Platforms") used to perform really well, but they don&”
“nope, i would advise against it. establish a unique strong brand. have a strong presence on all social channels. build from there.”
“We're a small owner-operated roofing and siding company in Pennsylvania. Most of our leads have come from our Google Business Profile and LSAs, but we're trying to add one more reliable lead source. We've spent a few thousand dollars on Google Search Ads and have tried just about everything we can think of. We built SKAG campaigns, switched to mostly exact match keywords, improved our landing pages, set up proper conversion tracking, tested Maximize Clicks and Maximize Conversions, a”
“https://preview.redd.it/0y0pjhx7pudh1.png?width=936&format=png&auto=webp&s=71a7e88a69218e3219a938b1242aab6015201213 +1 customer here. claude just recommended you over other big player. it's in pt-br but basically you have better price and mcp. Going for a trial and probably become a customer. congrats man”
“I need recommendations for a tool that will dynamically updates Google and Meta Ads when prices changes on a website. Our client has over 600+ locations, with 2,400+ campaigns, and their pricing changes based on markets, 2-3 times a week. Assume anything is possible (ex: site intergration, feed updates...) as the client has their own internal team, and is invested in doing things right the first time versus implementing a temporary fix. Location: US Budget for the Tool: Enterprise and Below Than”
“I threw money at the problem. First 50 ish paying users in the first week, with google ads I roughly paid around 11 euros per user with monthly revenue of around 35 euros/user. Ads are great lol”
“I have a local service business. I’m running PPC with my Wix website. For you who didn’t know on Wix you can see live visitor. A LOT for times I got charge by Google double for the same visitor. (because the visitor didn’t close the tab after calling for service and then it’s just reload the landing page) Or just double random clicks from the same visitor… (Refreshing the landing page, press on sitelinks couple times Someone can’t help me out how to fix it? I’ve been charged always double. alway”
“I am taking over SEO for a company with a decent backlink profile already (think low thousands of backlinks, which is much higher than the competitors in the area). This company has been paying for 10 articles to be written about them and then posted on various sites across the web- usually some form of blog site that doesn't get much traffic. It's been a few years since I did SEO full time, but I want to start posting this content to the site itself rather than sending them out for back”
“Paid ads but it's not worth it.. It's better to focus on seo, aeo, geo and organic social media content.. It's very slow at first but starts to gain momentum after a couple months”
“With the collaps of organic traffic that we see nowadays how long Mediavine, Ezoic and the others will survive? I mean Adsense have video ads, Gemini and all the other Google products as "publishers" but these agencies have only the websites that are keep losing traffic. Yes there is social traffic but i doubt could be enought and if i have to earn pennies i would just get rid of display ads, keep a clean user expierence and monetize with affiliate. And probably at that point i could j”
“Yeah, SEO can be done for insurance. Biggest mover is an optimized Google Business Profile. But you can't just set it and forget it. You need to keep getting reviews. Review velocity, how often you get reviews is a major driving factor. Google will promote an agency that only has 50 reviews but has gotten 5 of them in the last month over an agency that has 1000 reviews but they're years old. You need montly local and service page content, photos, service updates, Q&A management. Anal”
“Good day Redditors, Picking up from my previous post, we are now two weeks into July, and we have generated $292,685.00 in sales with $58,206.5 in total ad spend ($ 53,095.75 Meta and $5,110.75 Google) . Here's what's working for us. Here are the screenshots shopify and meta 1) DATA AND DECISION MAKING. First of all, we have had days when meta made no sense at all and sent shit traffic to our website, and luckily we spent only about $3000 of our total ad spend on bad traffic. How do we s”
“yeah the "paying to stay in the noisy phase" framing is spot on, thats basically what spreading thin does”
“Ads are probably worth it when you have $10k+ traction n money to burn testing creatives”
“for first paying users, almost certainly not. SEO compounds over time but you need signal now. Whats your plan for direct outreach? Feels like your tool's own methodology (finding leads via channels) could literally be applied to finding your own customers too.”
“I run a price comparison website (tens of thousands of monthly visitors) in a niche with thin affiliate commissions (1-3%). I'm considering a small paid tier (~€3-4/month) for power users, unlimited/instant alerts instead of free tier limits, extended history, that kind of thing. For anyone who's monetized a similar free-to-paid consumer tool: what conversion rate should I realistically expect from free to paid? What features actually get people to pay vs just being "nice to have&qu”
“They just lowered their threshold. I already signed up so I can’t go back and see what the new threshold is but I want to say around 2000 average monthly downloads.”
“I am in Lead Gen and going to use content as a way to get incremental traffic. I am qualified to write about the niche, but, I don’t want the articles to show up when someone googles my name. Since it is a YMYL niche I’m wondering if the strategy of having “editorial staff” as the author and it linked to a page about our staff, which only lists the credentials, but doesn’t state a specific person /name or include a link to a professional site (e.g LinkedIn)? Thanks in advance for any advice! ”
“Yeah it's better than nothing, the gap I'm trying to close is if the traffic brought by paid ads is high quality and converting/using the app. Like if someone says they came from Reddit, I can't tell if it was a paid ad or just a post or someone's recommendation. But yeah Apple doesn't make it easy :( That's an interesting tip, so basically saying let's not run any ads on Facebook/Instagram and use that as a baseline?”
“Since you already have solid SEO foundations from the agency work, you really just need something to keep the momentum going without the $1500/mo bill. I use BlazeHive for exactly this, it finds buyer-intent keywords and publishes straight to my CMS so I basically dont touch it. My organic traffic went up like 30% in the first two months and I spend maybe an hour a week on SEO now vs the 10+ hours I used to. Not sure about the multi-language thing tho, you might want to check if they support tha”
“Solid numbers for 3-4 months. 15.9% CTR is really good, most sites sit around 3-5% at that stage.”
“Going well, sitting at around 1.2k impressions now. Still mostly long-tail stuff but a few shorter keywords are starting to show up too.”
“True!! People just want the answer before they even hit the site. Tracking where you show up in AI answers seems like the logical next step for SEO audits.”
“Congrats on the impressions! For organic leads, focus on content marketing, blog posts about dark web threats can attract traffic. Share case studies or guides on your site. For SEO, optimize your keywords based on what potential users search for. Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find gaps. If you haven't yet, set up a newsletter to keep interested visitors engaged. Small steps add up.”
Yeah that’s what I’m thinking. Hopefully I’ll get there one day!!
“There is paid search with Google and Microsoft ads. You have email marketing for a lot of brands. Sometimes Reddit ads if it makes sense for the product and community.”
“Congrats on the early traction, 52 clicks from a brand new domain is solid, and your CTR of 4.4% at avg position 72 is actually wild because most people at that depth see under 1%, so your titles and meta descriptions are doing real work. On impressions not turning into clicks, that usually means you are ranking for stuff nobody is actually searching with intent, or your snippet is getting outwritten by bigger sites above you, so dig into the queries tab and look for ones where you are position”
“Glad to help! I was in similar position when I started. Keep working on it will be better!”
“I know this might sound like old-school advice, but people who aren't using AdBlock see simple text and image ads from Google. Sites out there are making ~10k a month using this idea.”
“Hey BHW, Recently started a new online business and decided to go harder on organic LinkedIn posting Been getting some solid results. Basically just scheduled 3 posts per day, no links, images etc just plain text posts. It's been 2 weeks now and this is what I've got so far in highlights: Not crazy numbers but decent for brand new company profile and just posting. Followers at about 45 and those comments/reposts are a bit off as some engagement has been happening Curious if anyone else h”
“Someone will know a way to make money from that. If you build a relationship with whoever you sell to they likely teach you and allow you to make more on your next venture. Personally I would have offered a free up front service that takes a percent of ads and acts as an affiliate while helping them grow.”
“A month into building my email and digital identity service, I thought I was doing everything right. I got 1,170 unique visitors between June 5 and July 12, all from organic search. That's a pretty decent start, right? But here's the kicker - I'm still sitting at $0 in revenue. Getting the traffic wasn't the issue. What I didn't anticipate was that curiosity doesn't equal conversion. People engaged with the site, with 6,142 pageviews and an average of 3.5 pages per visit,”
“Yes, start SEO on day 1. It will be the best traffic channel in 6 months if done decent. SEO keeps bringing traffic at no added cost in future. And if you start it later, results will also be delayed.”
“Yeah AI search is legit. This is what makes it so tricky - there’s no single right answer, each business has to balance the importance of SEO, paid ads and blog/FAQ material that gets picked up by AI.”
“I mean marketing grind or brand awareness grind. Its a constant push of content (posting, comments, articles, etc) that you or your team must do on social. Its an entire ocean out there and you must become visible. Month 1, 100 people will have seen your brand Month 2, 1000 people will have seen your brand Month 3, 5000 people will have seen your brand Month 8, 70000 people will have seen your brand Month 20, 500000 people will have seen your brand From those 500000 some will visit your app, som”
“I run a digital marketing agency. I’ve done SEO for over 10 years. I’ve played in the big leagues, Fortune 500 clients, technical SEO, full competitor and audience analysis, 12 months plans across multiple departments, etc etc… but no paid experience until 18 months ago. I had a few clients ask me about paid and I decided to hire a contractor to trial it out. Fast forward 18 months I have 2 full timers and a part timer. The team is growing and we are pitching more clients. The full timers have a”